I’ve Seen the Future and It Doesn’t Include Web Browsers

For my birthday this year, my husband bought me an Amazon Tap. The Amazon Tap is a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-enabled speaker that lets you use voice commands to play music, check the weather, order stuff on Amazon, look up things on Wikipedia, and on and on.

Who knew that this little speaker would quickly become my gadget of choice? I carry my Tap with me everywhere!

The Tap is powered by Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated virtual assistant. I connected my Tap to my home and work Wi-Fi, my iPhone and my Alexa app. I then connected my Alexa app to my IHeartRadio app and my Amazon app. There are many more Alexa integrations to what Amazon calls Skills. And since I’m an Amazon Prime member, I have access to Prime Music.

I mean, look at the kind of day I now have with the Tap around:

In the morning, I say, “Play NPR,” and Alexa starts playing the live stream from WAMU, the local NPR affiliate.

I can’t do everything on my Tap, but it’s coming. And from what I read and hear, voice is the new new thing. The XFINITY voice remote already lets you search for programs by voice. We can already talk to our cars. And we endlessly give commands to Siri on our iPhones and iPads.

One thought on “I’ve Seen the Future and It Doesn’t Include Web Browsers”

Having recently read a novel whose plot line included crazy scary hacking of IoT devices and appliances like ovens, refrigerators, even huge power saws, all based on the (apparent) fact that the software driving many of these items is old, out of date, and not security patched, necessarily – I’m thinking I plan to NEVER have to or be able to “speak” to my appliances :-)

But, overall I think you’re absolutely right. The future is not the web browser.